


the blood in your mouth

by anddirtyrain



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post 2x15 after they're rescued
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2015-03-10
Packaged: 2018-03-17 05:25:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3517088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anddirtyrain/pseuds/anddirtyrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but the rest of us are sort of hopeless without you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	the blood in your mouth

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sort of obsessed with Raven and Wick now and the 2x16 promo is not helping.

“Sorry about the blood in your mouth. 

I wish it was mine. "

.

.

.

 

She looks like such a little thing lying there.

He knows, from a purely technical point of view, she is. The woman is barely tall enough to reach just over his shoulders, and she weights next to nothing. And she’s young, really young actually. (She wears her age like a badge of honor, too. Youngest Zero-G mechanic. Better than you.) And she holds herself up with a strength he’s seen few grown men possess. He actually thinks she could take on any of them with just her bare hands and pure force of will. But she’s still small.

He’s never noticed until now.

Her breathing is arduous, her chest barely lifting up and down with every inhalation. She’s so quiet, looks so broken it hurts him, because she’s not. She’s not this. She’s a smart ass who calls him out on his bullshit, probably the only person he could say got him his ass handed to him. She’s strength and intelligence and he doesn’t realize exactly when did he start feeling so strongly about the mechanic but he knows he would’ve given everything to stop them from hurting her back in that goddamn mountain.

He’s never felt so powerless.

He’s an engineer, and he may be a smug bastard sometimes but if he can be proud of something is his head. Problem solving skills. He can get you from point A to point B with minimal difficulties. He gets shit done. Back on the Ark and here on the ground, he and his team, he and Raven ( _Raven_ ), they had the answers, right? So he’s not used to the feeling of having his hands tied (figuratively and literally, the sling on his arm reminds him). Especially not when someone he cares about is in danger.

She screamed, she kicked at them and fought tooth and nail; but a 5’5 woman with one usable leg was no match for three grow men, and as they strapped her down and started that fucking drill it hit him in the gut just how much she meant to him. He screamed his throat raw, he kicked against the walls and tried to pry the cuffs loose but they wouldn’t budge, and all the while- _her screams, the drill._

His arm had been fractured in the explosion, the only damn reason he couldn’t pick her up and carry her somewhere she’d be safe, where they both could hide it out. The Doc had told him what would have been an easy fix was a mess now, and he would be lucky if it healed properly. He’d spent so much time pulling against the cuffs, rattling those chains and trying to free himself that he had misplaced the bone-something or another- and _hadn’t he felt what he was doing to his arm?_

Truth is, he hadn’t. He’d felt nothing but blind hot rage as Raven was picked next and dragged to that table, as they tied her down and turned on the drill, nothing but her shrill screams filling the air.

It sends a chill down his spine even now that she’s lying in front of him, eyes closed and breathing, even if with effort.

Abby had told him that the next 24 hours would be critic and this isn’t his area of expertise but he knows enough to know what complications mean, especially when they’re paired with “marrow leaking into her bloodstream”.

See, the thing is that if it was him lying pale and sick on a stretcher he’s pretty sure she’d be able to hold it together. She’s smarter than him, for all he criticizes her impetuousness and an incapacity to foretells complications that seems innate to mechanics (an extra bomb would have saved them a world of trouble, would not have her just lying there, pale and small), she is. She solves problems in the blink of an eye he would take hours to go through. She’s smarter than him all right.

He makes a promise to himself right then that when she wakes up, he’ll tell her.

“Hey, wrench monkey,” he asks softly with the (affectionate, according to him, pain in the ass, according to her) nickname. He reaches out and touches her skin for the first time in hours, afraid to find her colder, but the fever breaking across her is almost comforting, as his fingertips drag down her blood covered cheek. He tried to clean her up earlier, but his arm is broken and he’s not that careful with his other one. And she’d probably roll his eyes at him anyways, or punch him in the arm (not so jokingly).

“I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but the rest of us are sort of hopeless without you.”

It’s true. She was a huge pain in the ass, but without her so many things would not have been accomplished. Without this one woman those hundred teenagers would all probably have been fighting with sticks, and God knows where the Camp would be.

“So...ah…” he clears his throat. His hands pushes hair away from her forehead, which is still burning up. Good, she’s _alive_.

“It would be pretty selfish of you to die, y’know?”

He threads his finger through his hair, resting his forehead on his palm for a few moments-he hasn’t slept since they came back but outright refused to leave her when she hadn’t woken up yet. It doesn’t matter that his presence changes nothing, he can sleep when he’s dead.

“Not… planning on it,” a familiar voice croaks out, and then he’s looking up and looking into her eyes. His good hand is on her face in a second, on her cheeks, pushing the strands of hair that have escaped her ponytail behind her ears.

“Raven.”

He wants to add a lot of adjectives to her name than he would not think of in a better frame of mind, too. He’s got it bad. (Cheesy fucker.)

“Hey…“

 “Is everyone-“

“They’re all okay,” he interrupts her, as he sees her face scrunch up in that particular way. When she’s trying to hide the fact that she’s in pain but he won’t fall for it. “You need to rest.”

“No rest for the wicked,” she groans, trying to move around and finding both of her legs tie her down now. “Can’t afford to leave you alone….what a nightma-“ she coughs and he’s quick to stand up and search for a glass of water, cursing his bad arm for not helping matters. He helps her rise her head a little as she takes the cup of water he offers with shaking hands.

“Just what would you do without me?” he asks her, once he lowers her head back down, and the answering eye roll brings the best sort of pang to his chest. She’ll never be his girl; it’s pretty clear she was born for no one but herself, but still.  He feels like a teenager all over again, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t beg whoever is listening that she gives them a chance one of these days. Because _Damn it, Reyes, you could have died._ Suddenly his very heart is hanging from a string in the form of the wounded woman lying on a stretcher in front of him.

“What would _you_ do without _me_?” she throws right back at him, a faint, tired smile on her lips as she closes those eyes of hers and sinks back into the makeshift stretcher.

“I don’t know,” he tells her quietly, squaring his shoulders as the hurt muscles begin to act up, and sits back down at her side. He may be a lot of things (things she could probably list alphabetically), but he isn’t a liar.

He isn’t leaving her, not a chance.


End file.
